Half-Life: Alyx
Half-Life: Alyx is Valve’s VR return to the Half-Life series. It’s the story of an impossible fight against a vicious alien race known as the Combine, set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Playing as Alyx Vance, you are humanity’s only chance for survival.
Your like matters. Every heart nudges this game's GamingPickz Score and where it ranks (a small 5% of the score), so the lists get better for everyone.
- Released
- 2020
- Developer
- Campo Santo
- Platforms
- 1 systems
- Critics
- 93
- Steam Deck
- unsupported
- Download
- Not stated
What is Half-Life: Alyx?
Half-Life: Alyx is Valve’s VR return to the Half-Life series. It’s the story of an impossible fight against a vicious alien race known as the Combine, set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Playing as Alyx Vance, you are humanity’s only chance for survival.
Description as published by the developer on its own store page, read 30 August 2026. It is marketing copy, not our assessment.
The record
| First released | 23 March 2020 |
|---|---|
| Developer | Campo Santo |
| Publisher | Not recorded |
| Platforms | PC |
| Genres | First-Person Shooter, Horror |
| Languages | 28 supported |
Source. Catalogue facts from Wikidata Q75653574, seeded 30 August 2026. Store data from Steam, read 30 August 2026.
How was Half-Life: Alyx received?
Method. Player figures are Steam's own totals for the PC version, read 30 August 2026. The Metacritic score is the one Steam publishes on its store page and can lag the site itself. Metacritic page. Neither is our opinion. We have not published a review of this game.
Accessibility
Seeing
- Subtitle Options
Hearing
- Custom Volume Controls
- Stereo Sound
- Surround Sound
Input
None declared
Difficulty
- Adjustable Difficulty
- Save Anytime
Method. Features the publisher declared on its own store page. A declaration is a floor, not a review.
What does it support?
| Capability | Support |
|---|---|
| Controller | Not stated |
| Cloud saves | No |
| Cross-platform play | No |
| Mod support | Steam Workshop |
| Online play | Single-player only |
| In-game purchases | No |
| Steam Deck | unsupported |
| Download size | Not stated |
| Add-on content | 1 DLC listed |
| Age gate | None |
Content descriptors
- Frequent violence or gore
- General mature content
Method. Read from the publisher's Steam listing on 30 August 2026. Describes the PC version. Console versions differ.
What does it cost?
Steam price in US dollars, read 30 August 2026. Prices move hourly and vary by region. Check the current price.
Is Half-Life: Alyx worth it?
98% of 105,097 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Overwhelmingly Positive. It costs $59.99 on Steam, and critics score it 93/100.
That is the data, not a verdict for sale: whether it is worth it depends on the price you pay and what you want. Players do report problems — see the reported-problems section below before buying. We have not published our own review of this game.
How long is Half-Life: Alyx? How long to beat it
Total play time for Half-Life: Alyx is about 19.1 hours to do everything, and around 12.2 hours to reach the end of the main story. These are player-submitted times from HowLongToBeat, not our own, shown with the number of players behind each.
| How you play | Hours | Players logged |
|---|---|---|
| Just the main story: straight through the critical path | 12.2h | 659 |
| Main + the extras: story plus the side content most people do | 14.3h | 474 |
| Completionist: everything: 100% the game | 19.1h | 122 |
At its current price of $59.99, beating the main story works out to about $4.92 per hour. That is the price divided by the hours, a value read and not a verdict: a longer game costs less per hour, which is not the same as being the better game.
Source: HowLongToBeat community submissions, read 2026-10-19.
Half-Life: Alyx system requirements
The minimum requirements from Half-Life: Alyx's Steam page. These are what it takes to launch and be playable, not to run at high settings.
| Memory | 12 GB RAM (other games at this level) |
|---|---|
| Processor | Core i5-7500 / Ryzen 5 1600 |
| Graphics | GTX 1060 / RX 580 - 6GB |
| System | 64-bit OS required |
Can your PC run it? Check Half-Life: Alyx against your exact GPU, CPU and RAM.
Where Half-Life: Alyx sits on the grid
Compare the whole catalogueHalf-Life: Alyx plotted on the axes the GamingPickz Score is built from, on the full 0 to 100 scale so its position is its real one. Change either axis to see where it lands.
1 games have both
Players. The share of Steam reviews marked positive, pulled toward the catalogue average in proportion to how few reviews stand behind it. A game with 200 reviews moves a long way toward the average; one with 200,000 barely moves at all. Without this a title sitting at 100 percent on nine reviews outranks Half-Life 2 at 98 percent on 278,000.
Popularity. A blend of two things that are not the same. Audience is how many people wrote a Steam review, which is a floor on how many played it. Reach is how many language editions of Wikipedia document the game, which is cultural footprint rather than sales. A game can score high on one and low on the other: a huge free-to-play title has audience without reach, and a landmark console exclusive has reach without a Steam audience at all. Where both exist they are averaged; where only one does, that one carries it.
- PC
Every point links to that game's entry. The value map and the reception map are fixed views of the same data.
How positions are decided
No paid placement, no favouritism, live third-party data
- Placed by the published method, not by us. Every coordinate is computed from the axis definitions and weights printed on this site. Nobody moves a point. See the axes.
- Nothing here is paid for. No sponsored placements, no promoted slots, no arrangement of any kind affects a position. If that ever changes it will be labelled and sit outside the ranking.
- No favouritism, including our own. The 16 games we have written full reviews of are scored by exactly the same formula as the other 1,510, from the same third-party inputs, and they land where it puts them. Our own opinion of a game does not enter its coordinates.
- A position is not an endorsement. It says how a game was received and what it costs, not that we recommend it. Where we do recommend something, it carries a written review with a name on it.
- Fetched from live third-party data. Player sentiment from Steam, critic aggregates as published on store pages, prices checked hourly, attention from Wikipedia. Each figure carries its source and the date it was read, and we do not adjust any of them.
Estimated sales for Half-Life: Alyx
These are estimates, not reported figures. Campo Santo has not published unit sales for Half-Life: Alyx, and nobody outside the company can measure them. What follows is arithmetic on the review count, with the method printed below so you can check it or reject it.
How this was calculated
Steam sales track review counts closely enough that dividing one by the other across games with published figures gives a usable multiplier. This is the standard method for estimating sales from outside a publisher.
| Reviews on Steam | 105,097 |
|---|---|
| Sales per review | 30 to 60 |
| List price | $59.99 |
| Assumed average selling price | 33% to 66% of list |
What this cannot tell you
Steam only. Console, Epic, GOG and retail sales are not in here. For a game that sold heavily on PlayStation this is a fraction of the real number.
The band is wide because the method is imprecise. Review rates vary with price, genre, launch era and how insistently a game asks. Published analyses put the ratio between 30 and 60 for paid games, and we show the whole range rather than picking a point in it.
The owner estimate above measures something else. SteamSpy counts accounts that have the game, which includes free weekends, bundles, giveaways and gifts. It sits higher than a sales figure for that reason, and the two are not alternative answers to the same question.
Revenue is the shakiest line. It assumes an average selling price well below list because most copies move in sales, and it ignores regional pricing, refunds, key resellers and whatever deal the publisher actually has with Valve. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a figure.
If Campo Santo publishes a real number we will use that instead and say where it came from. Our editorial policy covers how we handle figures we cannot verify.
Half-Life: Alyx price & deals: is it on sale?
We have one reading so far: $59.99 on 30 August 2026. Prices are checked daily from here, and this becomes a chart once there is more than one point to join. A single observation is a price, not a history.
Latest Half-Life: Alyx updates & patch notes
Pulled from Half-Life: Alyx's own Steam feed on 5 September 2026. Posts marked as from the studio were written by the developer; the rest are articles Steam syndicated from elsewhere. Every one links to its source.
What readers say about Half-Life: Alyx
Reviews written by people who have played it. These are separate from the GamingPickz Score and are never averaged into it: that score comes from thousands of Steam reviews with a sample-size correction, and a handful of unverified ratings would distort it rather than improve it.
Loading reviews…
Problems players report
We read the 300 most recent negative Steam reviews of Half-Life: Alyx on 30 August 2026 and counted what they mention. These are complaints, not confirmed defects: we have not reproduced any of them, and a review describes one person's machine. What the counts tell you is which problems more than one person ran into.
- Crashes and freezes38 of 300 (13%)
If you plan to use a Radeon GPU be aware you might run into really frequent crashes the dev team doesn't not know/want to fix.
Steam review, 7 August 2024 · 12 hours played · 17 readers marked it helpfulyeah this game is decent but why does it keep crashing every 20 minutes, i have a £4,000 PC and every time i pull my weapon out the game crashes and sends me back to my last save.
Steam review, 10 February 2024 · 2 hours played · 9 readers marked it helpful - Performance and stutter17 of 300 (6%)
Even though Batman ran on just the headset, the frame rate was smoother.
Steam review, 28 August 2025 · 4 hours played · 4 readers marked it helpfulI'm trying to run Alyx on 72hz and auto recommmend res and it still stutters, plays like S*** and crashes.
Steam review, 10 October 2025 · 50 hours played · 3 readers marked it helpful
A further 10 reviews call the game buggy or broken without saying how, which is why they are counted separately rather than assigned to a theme. Counted by keyword across review text, so a review discussing two problems is counted under both. Read the reviews yourself.
Half-Life: Alyx mods
Half-Life: Alyx supports Steam Workshop, and the 20 most-installed mods have 1,807,199 subscribers between them. The most installed is Gunman Contracts - Chapter 1 - The Extraction.
Did it run on your PC?
Tell other players how it ran on your machine. One tap, from your saved PC if you have one.
Where Half-Life: Alyx appears
The ranked lists and finder pages Half-Life: Alyx qualifies for, from its own genre and platform to what it takes to run.
Get the weekly rundown
One email a week: what moved in the rankings, what launched, and what dropped in price. No more than that, and unsubscribing takes one click.
We send the weekly email and nothing else. Your address is never sold, shared or used to build a profile, and it is not readable by anyone visiting this site. See our privacy policy.
Games like Half-Life: Alyx
24 games overlap with Half-Life: Alyx on the tags Steam players applied to it, on genre, and on theme. The closest are Black Mesa, Half-Life: Source and Resident Evil 7 Biohazard.
Part of the Half-Life series
Half-Life: Alyx is one of 12 Half-Life games we track. See the whole series ranked by the GamingPickz Score, plotted on the grid, and listed in release order:
Half-Life: Alyx head to head
See Half-Life: Alyx compared side by side, on score, price, specs and more:
More Half-Life: Alyx comparisons: vs F.E.A.R. 3, vs The Invincible, vs Portal 2, vs Half-Life 2, vs Half-Life, vs Portal, vs Schedule I, vs Left 4 Dead 2, vs Counter-Strike, vs Team Fortress 2, vs Red Dead Redemption 2, vs Resident Evil 4, vs Counter-Strike: Source, vs ULTRAKILL, vs Titanfall 2, vs Garry's Mod, vs People Playground, vs Lethal Company, vs Undertale, vs Phasmophobia, vs R.E.P.O., vs Project Zomboid, vs MiSide, vs Resident Evil 2, vs Batman: Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition, vs DOOM, vs Inscryption, vs Half-Life: Opposing Force, vs Half-Life: Blue Shift, vs Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, vs Half-Life Deathmatch: Source
Common questions about Half-Life: Alyx
What platforms is Half-Life: Alyx on?
Half-Life: Alyx is available on PC. It first released in 2020.
How much does Half-Life: Alyx cost?
$59.99 on Steam in the United States, read on 30 August 2026. Prices move often and vary by region, so check the store before buying.
Do players recommend Half-Life: Alyx?
98% of 105,097 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Overwhelmingly Positive. That is players rating it, not our review. We have not published a review of this game.
What is the Metacritic score for Half-Life: Alyx?
93 out of 100 for the PC version, as published on the game's own Steam store page. Steam can lag Metacritic by a few points.
Does Half-Life: Alyx work on Steam Deck?
Valve rates Half-Life: Alyx as unsupported on the Steam Deck, from its own testing.
Who made Half-Life: Alyx?
Half-Life: Alyx was developed by Campo Santo.
Is Half-Life: Alyx worth it in 2026?
98% of 105,097 Steam reviews are positive (Overwhelmingly Positive), and it is $59.99 on steam. That is the strongest signal we hold; "worth it" depends on the price you pay and what you want, so weigh the sentiment against the current price above.
Is Half-Life: Alyx on sale?
Not at the moment. Half-Life: Alyx is at its $59.99 list price on Steam, read on 30 August 2026. It has been cheaper before; the price history above shows when.
What are the system requirements for Half-Life: Alyx?
At minimum, Half-Life: Alyx needs 12 GB RAM, a Core i5-7500 / Ryzen 5 1600, a GTX 1060 / RX 580 - 6GB, from its Steam listing. That is what it takes to launch and be playable, not to run at high settings. Check it against your own PC on the can-I-run page.
How long does it take to beat Half-Life: Alyx?
about 12.2 hours for the main story, 14.3 hours with the main extras, 19.1 hours to complete everything, from HowLongToBeat's player-submitted times. These are community medians, so your own run may be shorter or longer.